Samsung’s Chromebook tops Amazon sales charts, new Chromebox launches

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Chromebooks launched in the summer of 2011 with Samsung and Acer on board. Since then, a handful of iterations have shipped from both companies, but they haven’t been particularly newsworthy. They’re small laptops sold cheaply that run a stripped down version of Linux (Chrome OS) with Google’s Chrome browser as the front end. Big deal, right? Well, the $325 11.6-inch Chromebook from Samsung is now at the top of Amazon’s laptop sales. Even more interesting is that two more Chromebooks are currently sitting in the Amazon’s top twenty.

If you take a look at the top one hundred list, you’ll see it’s mostly filled with low-end consumer Windows laptops, with some high-end gaming laptops and MacBooks peppered in. Only a few models of Chromebooks are being sold, so it’s easier for a single model to get the traction needed to rise in the charts. There isn’t really an equivalent Windows laptop to rally around, so sales are more spread out. With that caveat out of the way, this is still an interesting development. While Google’s Chrome OS hasn’t taken the world by storm the way that its mobile operating system has, three Chromebooks sitting in the top twenty best selling laptops is no small feat. While other netbooks are pretty much dead, the Chromebook seems to be relatively healthy.

Laptops aren’t the only Chrome OS game in town, though. Chromeboxes — tiny desktop machines that appear a lot like the Mac Mini — are another superb option for minimalist computing. Samsung has now redesigned its Series 3 Chromebox with an all-white aesthetic. It sports a 1.9GHz Celeron CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 16GB SSD. That’s pretty much identical to the previous model that shipped earlier in 2012. This new model isn’t available from US retailers quite yet, but there’s no reason to fret. The previous Mac Miniesque model is still available for just over $300 if you just can’t wait for the redesign. [See: Unleash your Chromebox: How to dual-boot Ubuntu Linux on your Chrome OS device]

With Windows 8 sales proving to be lackluster and the rise of cloud computing, it’s no surprise that cheap, underpowered hardware that focuses on the web is gaining traction. The truth is, most computer users don’t need much more than a web browser these days. Chrome OS and the hardware that ships with it still have a long way to go to become dominant, but it’s clear now that big, bloated desktop operating systems like Windows and OS X are on the wane. Mobile and cloud computing is where the whole market is headed, and it’s only a matter of time before the traditional desktop OS becomes a niche market for power users and businesses. Clearly, Google is positioning itself as the successor to Microsoft’s dominance in computing.

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